The Smoking Gun

Whenever my former boss wanted to find out the real story behind some particularly juicy piece of office scuttlebutt, he’d call me into his office and say, “Hey kiddo, go outside and have a cigarette.”

The “fearless leader” wasn’t trying to kill me by small degrees. He simply knew that corporate hierarchy had no place among nicotine fiends. From lowly customer service reps to highly-placed VPs, we were all branded as pariah and it was this bond that allowed the gossip to flow as freely as the smoke.

One of the more interesting folks who shared my addiction to the demon weed was a lawyer named Cat, who threw your image of the buttoned-down, buttoned-lipped attorney right out of court. Always smiling, always chatty, Cat could talk about any subject under the sun, but I remember a particularly striking conversation we had when I mentioned a “Vanity Fair” article I’d read about female war correspondents. Turns out her older sister, Marie Colvin, was one of the women profiled in the article.

A hometown girl born and raised in Oyster Bay, Colvin is a lauded reporter for the “Sunday Times of London” who has hidden in the hills with Chechen rebels, dodged Serb sniper fire in Sarajevo and lost her left eye covering the civil war in Sri Lanka. “Was I stupid?” she has written. “Stupid I would feel writing a column about the dinner party I went to last night.”

Colvin has been popping up in my memory bank of late now that journalism has become a most deadly profession. Last year alone, 110 journalists and media staff were killed, a disturbing 40% increase over 2008. This year looks like it’s on track to meet or beat that number, with 52 journalists already killed from January through August.

Surprisingly, only three of those murdered in 2009 were war correspondents like Colvin. The rest were local journalists covering their own turf, most killed in retaliation for their work and not for getting caught in the crossfire. Among the most Fourth Estate unfriendly nations are Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka and, topping the list for 2009, the Phllippines, where 31 reporters were wiped out in a single massacre.

But in the drug cartel-riddled country of Mexico, journalism itself has become the victim. On September 19th, “El Diario de Juarez,” the largest newspaper in the country’s most violent city of Ciudad Juarez, ran a front page editorial directly addressing the warring factions: “We ask you to explain what you want from us, what we should try to publish or not publish, so we know what to expect.” After having two of his staff gunned down within two years, the paper’s editor told a reporter for the AP, "We don't want to continue to be used as cannon fodder in this war because we're tired." Since “El Diario” was one of the last media outlets in Mexico willing to cover the drug wars, the fact that they’re giving up rings the death knell for freedom of the press.

While newspapers scramble to shore up their free-falling circulations and debate whether or not to pay wall their sites, perhaps the larger problem they should be tackling is how to keep their global brethren safe while putting governments’ feet to the fire in the prosecution of these crimes.

Smoking out the story shouldn’t mean that the reporter gets smoked.